#The Harley Quinn animated series

[randoparody]

Recycled joke from Gotham Adventures

[avnj0gia]

Thank you to the good people behind Harley Quinn for this and this specifically

[rtbyg]

girls, gays, and batman

[spicyhamsamson]

I am. So fucking tired of Batman being portrayed as a bad parent and a toxic person. And it’s so goddamn widespread. Fuck, it might be as bad as the whole “Superman being a kindhearted Boy Scout is boring” take.

I get it, the man’s not exactly stable, he watched his parents get murdered in front of him and spent years of his life training to fight crime dressed like a giant scary bat, of course he’s not perfect.

But to say that Bruce Wayne isn’t caring, isn’t empathetic, to call him abusive…it just misses the point of who the character is to me.

Why do you think he fights crime? Yes, part of it is because he’s bitter and sad because his parents were cruelly ripped from him as a child, and he’s lashing out against the corruption of his city. It’s arguably the focus of his earlier years. But he learns to become more than that. He learns to bring hope, a chance to be better.

Harleen Quinzel is the Joker’s right hand lady, but she’s also a victim of an abusive relationship and a woman with a surprisingly strong moral compass and a love for animals, and wants to get better. That’s why we see time and time again that he has a noticeable soft spot for her, because he knows that she’s a good person at her core.

Harvey Dent is a man who will decide someone’s fate on a coin toss(and a pretty inaccurate depiction of DID), but he’s also Bruce’s close friend who clearly needs help learning to live with his condition, rather than try to get rid of it, and someone who he still goes out of his way to visit, even after everything, because he recognizes he’s not just a criminal with a weird gimmick, he’s a man who is struggling with a condition that he’s mishandled his whole life.

Victor Fries is a cold, emotionless man who will callously discard allies and blame them for being careless, but he’s also a man who’s either lashing out because he had the love of his life taken from him, or just desperate to make sure she isn’t taken from him, and is willing to do anything just to guarantee her survival. Of course Batman would understand, his whole life was defined by having people he loved taken away from him.

Even the Joker, arguably one of the most morally bankrupt characters in all of fiction, is someone that Batman has offered a chance to. After the guy shoots the daughter of his friend, a girl he cared for like she was his own kid, and paralyzes her from the waist down, he tells the Joker that he doesn’t want to hurt him. He wants to get him help. He looks at this monster who has taken countless lives and says “You don’t have to be alone.”

For fuck’s sake, he sat with Joe Chill in his last moments so that he wouldn’t be alone. Joe Chill, the man who murdered his parents, who took so much from him, the person responsible for all of the misery and suffering he’s gone through. And he sits with the man to comfort him while dies. Do you know how much emotional intelligence and maturity that must take? To comfort someone who arguably ruined your life?

And you’re gonna tell me the man who did that would abuse his kids?

That he’d hold up the young man whose death was his greatest failure, the boy he grieved, and say this?

That he’d look his goddamn son in the eyes and say this to him?

Why the FUCK do you think he took in Dick Grayson in the first place? It wasn’t because he saw the kid and thought “Ah. A potential soldier.”, it was because he saw a boy experiencing the same heartbreaking loss he had so many years ago, and wanted to make sure he didn’t end up as bitter and miserable as he was.

Why do you think he smiled when Tim Drake presented him a broken watch for Father’s Day? Because he was just happy to see the boy alive and safe.

DAMIAN LITERALLY POINTED AT A COW AND SAID “I’m keeping her. She’s Bat-Cow.” AND BRUCE JUST WENT WITH IT. DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO ARGUE WHY BRUCE SHOULD LET HIM KEEP HER. HE SAID “this cow is my pet now” AND BRUCE SAID “aight, bet”.

The thing about Batman is that he wants to make sure nobody else ends up feeling the way he does. That’s not just about stopping a mugger so a boy’s parents aren’t gunned down. It’s about giving his loved ones the support and care that he couldn’t have, because it was taken from him. It’s about comforting someone who just went through a traumatic experience and letting them know that they’re going to be okay. It’s about going to someone locked away in a cell who thinks that they’re a lost cause and a burden to society and telling them that he wants to help them get better. It’s about EMPATHY and COMPASSION.

That’s what makes him a HERO. He’s meant to inspire us, to show us that we can have that same empathy for others around us, that we can turn our suffering into hope for a better future.

I just wish more people at DC would start recognizing that. But I might as well follow that example myself. Maybe through this struggle of having to see this hero mistreat the people around him and act like a grade-A jackass, people will start to recognize that missing compassion, and slowly but surely, it might come back. After all, what is this post, if not trying to bring attention to the matter in the hopes of fixing it?

[ordinaryschmuck]

Let it be known that Harley Quinn was an invention of Batman: The Animated Series, and Arleen Sorkin is the voice who brought the character to life.

Batman fans owe a lot of this character to her, and I may her memory be a blessing.

(Thank you @wild-mare-of-prosecution for letting me know the importance of the line "May her memory be a blessing.")

[lgbtpopcult]

Best WLW animated shows 2023

Harley Quinn

The Owl House

I'm in Love with the Villainess

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady

Rwby

Disenchantment

Yuri is my Job

[hasaniwalker]

Goodbye Arleen Sorkin. thank you for helping give us this absolute legend of a character.

Like a lot of people. Batman the Animated Series was a big influence on me and seeing the passing of Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin feels like an extreme loss. Thankful for all the amazing stories they gave us.

[mraivyc]

been awhile

[koutone]

the one and only Harley Quinn ♦️🖤 rest well Arleen Sorkin, may her memory be a blessing. thank you for everything

[yoon-seoah]

© talt_lo

[puppetwoman17]

Headcanon that the bats are the only people in Gotham who don’t know about Joker Junior.

The only people who know JJ’s identity are Bruce, Barbara, Jim Gordon, Joker himself, and Harley Quinn. Tim made Bruce promise not to tell Dick, and that continued when Jason came back, with him not wanting to be one of the older man’s triggers. The trend followed with Duke, Cass, Steph, and Damian, with him being more and more certain that if he told them, they would hate him.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and the batkids soon notice how differently Gotham treats Red Robin.

Rogues like Riddler, Harley, and Poison Ivy refrain from hurting him too much. Seasoned thugs quickly take away any electrocution devices from the newer ones, stating that “we don’t electrocute Red Robin”. When it comes to RR, Gotham’s citizens can get very peeved with the Bat.

The kids also notice the odd closeness between Jim, Babs, and Tim. Hell, there are times where they invite the older man to dinner and he goes off to whisper with Tim. The one time someone tried to subtly follow them, Babs stopped them in their tracks.

Everything comes to ahead when Dick goes deep into the bat computer archives for a case he assumes is tied to another. And lo and behold, he finds something titled Junior. He assumes that this is about a child villain and is curious, as the date tells him this happened while he was off in Bludhaven so many years ago.

It’s not.

He calls in the other bats(Tim is somewhere else) and they read through the files and watch the videos. God, the videos.

Dick is angry. Him and his siblings are fuming. Everything comes together and makes so much sense.

How some Gotham citizens treat RR differently. How Jim Gordon always makes sure RR is okay. How Babs knows how to calm Tim down better than anyone else. How Bruce always looks so guilty when he looks at Tim, a scarily similar look as the one he gives to Jason.

Their brother had been keepinh this secret for years, probably because he didn’t want them to hate them(Jason shakes his head furiously. “Stupid kid”.)

When Tim comes home, lo and behold with Babs, he immediately clocks onto their thoughts and makes a break for it. Babs blocks the door for everyone else. She says nothing.

Thats as far as I got.

[paperficwriter]

Okay but I'm not the only one who caught the Harley Quinn vibes, right?

And honestly I feel like in general I can see some Harley-ness in Fizz overall--certain points of the voice acting, the attitude, some of his antics. I wonder if there was some inspiration there.

(and ngl I'd love for the sequence to be an homage to Arleen Sorkin, but with the amount of time that goes into the show I doubt it)

[batmananimated]

Rest in peace, Arleen Sorkin. Harley Quinn's voice actor in Batman The Animated Series and the rest of the DCAU.

[juckalope]

when you win best couple at the local villy awards with your plant gf 😳🍾

harley later broke into joker's house to get the award back, right?

[ducksandboots]

girlfriends wearing each other’s merch

[lasagoofs]

can you tell i've been rewatching batman cartoons lately